THE WORLD Congress on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and
Related Intolerance will be held in South Africa from August 31 to
September 7, marking the culmination of the International Year of the
Elimination of Racial Discrimination. The conference itself is a
testimony to an ongoing fight for social justice, to battles won as
well as battles remaining. The very fact that it is being held in
South Africa is a tribute to Mr. Nelson Mandela and a symbol of the
victory won when the apartheid regime, representing one of the most
extreme examples of racism, yielded to world-wide democratic
movements. The decision to hold such a conference marks the
determination not to be content with a few significant steps forward,
but to move ahead and annihilate all the vestiges and forms of the
brutal discrimination that for so long has tyrannised over the
majority of the peoples of the world.

The South Africa conference also marks a big step ahead for the
global Dalit movement. After over two-and-a-half decades of
organising, caste is being recognised as a form of racist-related
discrimination and will be discussed in United Nations forums. Two-
and-a-half decades of obstructionism by the Indian Government and the
Indian elite is being overcome.

The beginnings of this world-level Dalit organising can be traced to
the period of the Emergency, when in August 1975 Dalits in the U.S.
under the leadership of Dr. Laxmi Berwa organised a demonstration
against the visit of Indira Gandhi. Dr. Berwa, a physician practising
in Washington D.C., had mobilised under the banner of VISION,
``Volunteers in Service to India's Oppressed and Neglected.'' Dr.
Berwa's organising had also illustrated one of the first examples of
unity between Dalits and Black Americans (African-Americans), for he
was offered the chance to present his case on radio stations
controlled by African-Americans in Washington. For perhaps the first
time, in the very backyard of the Indian Embassy, stories of
atrocities on Dalits and the continuing burden of casteism could be
heard by Americans, whose image of India had been only that of the
``land of Gandhi.'' About the same time, a small businessman in
Toronto, Mr. Yogesh Warhade, founded the Ambedkar Mission and began
efforts to take the cause of Dalits to the forums of the United
Nations. In England, Mr. T. Hirekar began to work along similar
lines, and Buddhist groups began to organise. Gradually, a world-wide
Dalit movement began to take shape.

It has not been easy. Since Dalits are among the poorest sections of
India, migration has been a rare option for them; even among migrants
to the Gulf, Dalits from Kerala have been very under- represented
compared to the general population. In the U.S., the situation is
even more severe. Historically speaking, there were never large
sections of working class Indians who migrated to the U.S., unlike
Chinese and Japanese populations; those who did (Sikhs to California)
were forbidden to bring their wives. For this reason, the NRI
community in the U.S. today is one of the most affluent among
minorities, and it is even more upper caste- dominated than India as
a whole. Perhaps this explains why, when NRIs in the New York area
raised money to finance a chair of South Asian Studies at the
University of Columbia, they refused suggestions to let it be named
after Columbia University's most famous Indian graduate, Dr.
Ambedkar. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad and similar organisations have
found fertile field among Indians in the U.S., and sites relating to
India on the Internet are clearly Hindutva dominated. Those Dalits
going abroad have rarely been in the universities, more often working
outside as engineers, doctors, or occasional small businessmen.

However, long years of organising work by groups such as VISION and
the Ambedkar Mission have paid off, and the growing human rights
movement has begun to hear the slogan, ``Dalit rights are human
rights.'' Not only have Dalit-oriented NGOs sprung up to take the
issue to the new World Conference on Racism, but a group of
enterprising activists has begun Dalit and Bahujan e-mail forums and
an excellent website, www.ambedkar.org. Similarly, efforts to build
connections between African-Americans and Dalits have gone on. One of
the first attempts was a conference in 1986, also organised at
Columbia University, dealing with Untouchability and Racism, drawing
together Black scholars and Indian Dalit scholars as well as non-
Dalit scholars dealing with issues of caste. In more recent years,
journals such as Dalit Voice have organised tours of India by
representatives of African-American groups. The Conference Against
Racism is one example of such linkages being recognised.

Unfortunately, the Union Government has from the beginning offered
adamant resistance to taking up the issue of caste at the U.N. - just
as it has resisted the efforts of adivasis to be included among
``indigenous peoples.'' Scholarly study of caste issues has been
discouraged (students proposing to do their Ph.D. work on this issue
tend to get their visa applications refused) and, following the
Columbia conference not only did the Government refuse to let a
follow-up conference be held in India, but American organisers of the
Columbia conference were denied research visas.

This unwillingness to recognise that caste is a persisting problem of
Indian society, with global implications, has continued during recent
years, and government spokesmen have opposed having it taken up at
the South Africa conference, arguing that this would only lead to
``diluting'' the efforts to eliminate racism. This official position
has most recently been put by the Attorney-General, Mr. Soli
Sorabjee, who argues in addition that the issue of caste is an
``internal'' matter. It is sad that the country which has not
hesitated to condemn racism and apartheid elsewhere should be so
sensitive on the issue of caste that it should oppose this form of
``globalisation'' and try to retreat behind a saffron curtain on the
issue of human rights within the country. As Ms. Smita Nirula, a well-
known activist on the issue of Dalit rights, has argued, India is a
signatory to many U.N. rights documents condemning discrimination on
the basis of ``descent''; yet in this case it has made every effort
to block the issue and has never been ready to have it discussed in
Parliament. ``While countries may ignore the pronouncements of U.N.
treaty bodies, they cannot ignore their own Constitutions or the
voices of their citizens. The spirit of this conference and own
constitutional commitment to freedom of expression, equality, and the
abolishment of untouchability demands no less.'' Indians may find it
demeaning to be condemned for forms of racism, but what is truly
demeaning is the effort to block discussion, the refusal to have
social transparency before the world.

Unfortunately, leading intellectuals too have supported the
Government position. A major example was an article in The Hindu on
March 10, 2001 by Mr. Andre Beteille. Mr. Beteille, however, indulges
in some rhetorical overkill; for he not only denies that caste has
anything to do with racism, but even appears to be against the effort
by the U.N. to deal with racism. ``What is neither understandable nor
excusable,'' he writes, ``is the attempt by the United Nations to
revive and expand the idea of race, ostensibly to combat the many
forms of social and political discrimination prevalent in the
world.'' Mr. Beteille has taken an extreme position, but it would
still be useful to deal with the questions raised by his arguments:
what is racism, what is race, and what is the relation between race
and caste, or racism and casteism?

MR. ANDRE BETEILLE has argued two major points in his article, ``Race and
Caste'' (The Hindu, March 10). One is that racism was based on false
science; there are no genetically and biologically different races among
human beings. The other is that caste has nothing to do with race, and
therefore to include caste in a discussion of racism is erroneous, however
politically useful it may seem to some people.In fact his two points
contradict one another. Neither caste as a social system nor ``racism'' are
based on actual biological differences among human beings. Both, though, are
systems of discrimination that attribute ``natural'' or essential qualities
to people born in specific social groups. In other words, while caste has
nothing to do with ``race'', the justifications of caste discrimination have
a lot to do with the social phenomenon of ``racism''.

As Mr. Beteille has argued, ``race'' in terms of naturally different species
does not exist among human beings. The science of genetics is now strikingly
clear on this - there are no significant genetic differences among socially
identifiable groups of people; the genetic variation among individuals is by
far greater than any among any society group. But, this is only to say that
``racism'' as a social phenomenon is based on a lie; it does not provide us
an analysis of why that lie has come to exist.

Racism, which is the attribution of ``natural'' characteristics to groups of
human beings, came into full-scale existence in the last few centuries,
largely in connection with imperialism. In order to justify the brutalities
of conquest and subjugation, the non-white peoples conquered by the colonial
powers had to be viewed, and were viewed, as less than human. The new
biological sciences and even genetics came in handy for this purpose.
Suddenly skin color and the shape of heads could be taken as representing
some inherent biological and genetic features which had larger implications.
Dominance was asserted to be the result of the ``natural'' (biological,
genetic) superiority of white European peoples, who had the god-given charge
of caring for the ``lesser'' peoples of the world.

This connection of racism with recent European-based imperialism is not to
say that cultures of non-white peoples, whether Chinese or Japanese or the
Africans themselves, have lacked systems of discrimination similar to
``racism''. It is simply that the European form has been dominant in the
world over most of the last centuries, and has been linked with the
strongest forms of oppression.

Racism, or ideas of innate, biological superiority and inferiority is, as
Mr. Beteille himself has noted, a very ``plastic'' concept. All kinds of
``races'' have been postulated; class differences themselves were even
interpreted at times in terms of race. It was quite natural, then, that when
the British conquered India at the time of the full-fledged flourishing of
racist concepts, when they were puzzled by the phenomenon of caste, that
they should interpret it in terms of race. Thus, linguistic similarities
among many of the languages of India and European languages were linked to
groups such as the Aryans, identified as racial types, and using the notion
of an ``Aryan conquest'', the argument was made that the upper three varnas
were descended from the Indo- European ``Aryans'', and the Shudras, Adivasis
and Dalits from non-Aryan indigenous people. In fact, racism in India has
been as much a lie as elsewhere; the millennia of mixing of
linguistic-ethnic groups, Aryan, Dravidian, Sino-Tibetan, Austro-Asiatic,
has resulted in little clear distinction between caste categories. Ambedkar
himself was categoric in rejecting the ``Aryan theory'' or the racial theory
of caste. Caste was not a racial division but a division of races, he said
(still using the category); Punjabi Brahmans and Punjabi Untouchables were
ethnically the same, and Tamil Brahmans and Tamil Untouchables were not
racially different.

However, what has to be answered is why this ``Aryan theory'' proved so
attractive to Indians themselves, why interpreting caste in terms of race
has been so pervasive. The reason is precisely because of its resonance with
indigenous themes of caste. For caste, like race, is based on the notion
that socially defined groups of people have inherent, natural qualities or
``essences'' that assign them to social positions, make them fit for
specific duties and occupations; it is their swadharma to carry out these
duties. The word jati has been applied to species of plants and animals; and
quite naturally many Indians thought of human castes as similar to such
species. Thus, when the Buddha sought to refute the notion of
birth-determined caste, two and a half millennia ago, he referred to the
basic physical similarity of all human beings. According to the
Sutta-Nipata, when asked by Vasettha, a Brahman, to settle a debate between
him and a friend about whether it is ``birth'' or ``life'' that makes a
Brahman, the Buddha replies that whereas grass and trees, insects, snakes,
fish and birds have diverse species - he uses the term jati - among humans
this is not so. ``Men alone show not that nature stamps them as different
jatis. They differ not in hair, head, ears or eyes, in mouth or nostrils,
not in eyebrows, lips, throat, shoulders, belly, buttocks, back or chest.''
He then goes on to say that one who lives by keeping cows is a farmer or
kassako; on who lives by handicrafts is a tradesman or sippiko; one who
lives by selling merchandise is a vanijjo; one who lives by services done
for hire is a pessiko or wage-worker; one who lives by taking things not his
is a robber; one who lives by warfare is a yodhajivao or soldier; one who
lives by sacrificial rites is a yajako or priest; one who rules is a monarch
or raja. This denial of innate, inborn differences between jatis contrasted
with arguments in the Manusmriti that, for example, Shudras were by essence,
by nature, designed to serve, that they were created as servants. Thus,
because such notions of ``natural'' differences lay behind justification of
the varnas, it is perhaps not so surprising that when the British put
forward their racial theory of caste, it was accepted by so many Indians
also. The original theological justification - varnas created out of the
original Purusha - could be replaced by a pseudo- scientific justification.
Thus, caste is not based on race; but the theories justifying caste, or
caste as an ideological construct, were similar enough to racism to allow a
racial interpretation of caste. (It has to be added also that many of the
Indian elite, including Gandhi, used sociologically themes of a harmoniously
functioning society to justify an idealised varna system).

The fact that the United Nations is holding a conference on racism is not a
matter of perpetuating notions of ``race''. Indeed, significant progress in
most countries has been made over the last decade in fighting existing forms
of racism, caste discrimination and similar social forms. This is true also
in India. Yet it would be foolhardy to say that racism or caste
discrimination do not exist, whether we are talking about the United States,
South Africa itself, Japan where an indigenous group similar to
Untouchables, the Burakumin, have been organising, or India. Racism and
casteism cannot be annihilated by ignoring their existence. Policies to
eradicate these social evils require full consciousness of their extent,
knowledge of their various expressions, and will to take public action. In a
global age, fighting racism, caste discrimination and similar phenomenon
means global alliances and international as well as national policies. There
is no reason for a government representing the Indian people to fight this;
if the government does so, that means it is representing very different
interests.